Update 02/12/2020

hi this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado it's cold and gloomy lots of snow on the ground and I just got back from Cancun where I was at Satoshi round table there's a nice warm 80 degrees and here I think it's five degrees outside so it's very cold anyway had a great time on the road visiting suits and spooks meeting the McChrystal group as chillon front that's jock a winning shot and a lot of interesting people in the public and private sector and had a great time at Satoshi roundtable talking to all the industry leaders from Brock peers to the and the EO skies the tazed those guys to everybody else in between it's it's always a nice place where you get to hang out with friends enemies and frenemies and we got to see the overall sentiment got to talk to a lot of institutional investors got to talk to a lot of VCs got to talk to a lot of defi vendors and investors and it's just nice to see that the industry starting to leave crypto winter and it's starting to enter crypto summer or its very least crypto spring so I think 2020 is going to be a very big year for everybody our selves included the news of the day is that we pushed out a blog post where we talked about the most significant update to Cardno since the launch of byron this was the update of the Cardinal node and the update of the Cardinal wallet the Cardinal Explorer backend and the web api so Tim Harrison released a blog post today on the I which K web site so if you go to our blog you can read about this update but basically these two pieces of software constitute the foundations upon which we are deploying Shelley and we've been working on this software continuously with a massive team for about 18 months and so it's really really good to finally get this out into the general public for the use at the moment by exchange operators and this will be the the note that people will use to upgrade to the OPF T Hartwell which is coming in February 20th for our change partners moving forward the most significant retail update so the things to those who use Daedalus will be coming shortly after we've cleared the Obi ft heart Fork and that's where we take the new Haskell wallet back-end and combine that with this note release alongside the all the other infrastructure and that basically means we've completely redone all the code for every user of Cardinal from the exchange to the investor to the Daedalus user everybody who holds it everybody's doing something with it will be using completely new software which is really good software on internal benchmarks it's about two to three times faster it has half the memory footprint it's a lot of time syncs in under an hour wallet recovery is faster every component of this software is just really built well and it's really amazing to kind of see that finally go live and so this was a major milestone for us and we're real proud of it I'd encourage everybody to go to our blog and read about it and then a little bit more than a week about eight days from now we'll do the OPF Tiahrt fork and we'll give everybody a nice warning and we'll probably do a media release and a video next week explaining what the differences are between or borås classic and/or Borisov EFT and how we're going to use Oh PFT to get us to preyas which is what we're launching shellye with so so that's something you guys should look forward to drop and then as we get a little past the Oh PFT hard fork and clear all those upgrades because there's gonna be a lot of coordination work that we're going to do then we'll start coordinating the release of the whole bundle the new version of Daedalus the new wallet back-end and this new node to everybody inside the entire system not just the euros and the matrixes and finances of the world we've also been working very closely with our exchange partners about writing some special-purpose libraries and redoing some of our API s and some of our infrastructure so that it's considerably easier to list EDA and basically use a DOS command line side for basically people who want to hold it on behalf of others whether those be custodian Exchange's wallet providers cloud wallets what's going on with your ROI and so forth so those are very tight relationships in some cases where co-locating are engineers in the offices of of these exchanges and we're actually having a great dialogue with them and they're giving us lots of cool business and technical requirements and we have a nice feedback loop that's forming and so in the coming weeks and months the output of that relationship will result in a major upgrade to the address dia framework so you'll see a better Explorer you'll see a better wallet and more importantly an SDK for those who wish to build things on top of our software so perhaps their own wallets or perhaps their own user experiences or so forth or in the case of exchanges that wish to list us or redo the listings of that those wallets are more reliable to give you a sense of proportionality once this is all done we're talking about software that conceivably could run 24/7 for weeks months perhaps even years without even having to be rebooted and even when it has to be rebooted can do so very quickly so you should see after this release a significant reduction in wallets that go down for maintenance furthermore we're building these things with a lot of future proofing in mind so exchanges who wish to participate it's taking as a service for customers similar to how coin base is doing that with pesos and other systems they'll be able to offer those services to their customers so if you don't want to stake locally you by leaving your Aida in the care of these entities can choose to have them stake on your behalf and so we've been having some great communication with our partners about how to accommodate that and what they need on their side to make sure this can be done safely one of the hallmarks of our ecosystem is that we will support Colt staking so what this functionally means is that you could take your ADA put it into a cold wallet and then generate credentials much like how you would transmit a transaction from a ledger device to something like ledger live for example and that is a delegation transaction and then you can manage delegation preferences from a hot interface meaning an interface that's connected to the Internet so at no time will the value keys the keys I should control the ADA to spend the ADA ever have to be exposed to the general internet for a person to be able to stay with that value which is a huge win and from an operational security side means that the exchanges can offer a lot more third party offers can offer a lot more security to their customers so it's almost as if you have a custodial account yet you're able to control it as if it's a hot wallet exchange account so we're really excited to to see that and we're building that in tandem with our exchange partners and we hope that as many exchanges as possible offer that service to their customers because sometimes people are just not positioned where they can hold that asset themselves for a variety of reasons maybe they just don't trust their operating environment or they enjoy the convenience of the exchange but it's nice to have the ability to do this in such a secure environment that it's almost as if it is an insured or custodial environment so look for that as well the incentivize test net is going to get an update sometime today or early tomorrow our engineers are just right now finalizing a few things for the Wednesday update we skip last week because we're bundling two weeks of work in it's a pretty big update for the new Jormungandr release and I believe we still are on target for Friday update where we're gonna bundle Dedalus the new wallet back ended the latest version of Jormungandr together if this week's release doesn't fix your ITN problems probably next week or the week after will have a considerable effect on that we've identified a collection of problems and the first batch of those problems were resolving with this update and then each week we're going to target another batch from being locked to a trusted peer to some disconnection issues and so forth we've noticed that network stability has massively improved it's gone from the low 40 percentile to about 90% so the network upgrades we've been doing to the ITN week after week definitely have yielded some dividends but those haven't quite percolated down to the end user yet because of some of the things with Dettol ism the way that we've upgraded that side the ecosystem so Friday will be the first batch of updates for you guys on the Dedalus wallet side and then every week we'll probably do another update and we'll just keep tackling batch after batch and at some point it'll it'll magically repair itself but not too far off so apologies for the delays in that respect but things are definitely moving the right direction if you're still having issues I'd highly encourage you to use your ROI they have made massive improvements and upgrades and a very short period of time and they've got a very useable beautiful user experience so for whatever reason you're having a connecting to network issue on your on your Dedalus client and you don't want to wait a few weeks for that to resolve itself then just transfer your credentials to euro I use that for the time being and they come back to it in about two weeks yeah three weeks and download the latest version and probably very good chance that those issues will finally abate resolve themselves so I'm very proud of that team and we've certainly learned a lot there's also another blog post that we released last week which talks about KPIs for the ITM and Danelle patel every week has been upgrading our KPIs and our the metrics that we're tracking and we're learning quite a bit from this experience of running the ITN so do read that blog post and we'll continue releasing those KPIs on a regular basis and we may even drag those into the Explorer interface we have four Cardinals so that people can enjoy that so overall the itn has been a great success in getting us to that point of getting over a thousand stake pools building a relationship with pool operators and identifying certain key people in the ecosystem that we really need to have a strong dialogue with to make sure that the business side is taking as well understood there's always more to do and there's a certainly huge amount of cleanup and polishing to do but overall it's been a good experience for everyone involved if not frustrating at times which I fully appreciate and understand but that's the nature of alpha-beta software is unfortunately it can be frustrating at times but that's good documentation is certainly slated for a huge improvement we're currently executing a plan internally to build a dedicated team actually two teams of black team and a red team to completely redo Cardinal docks and our hope is to have the first major update of Cardinal docks done sometime in late March so it'll go from the 2017 2018 documentation to a completely redone documentation standard and the nice part is we just have somebody Bay's wonderful people in the organization outside of the organization to assist us in this that we think the quality of the documentation will be massively improved the way we've been building things makes it pretty easy for us to specify a lot of things that ought to be specified it's just unification of those things and making sure it's readable and also localizable it's very important that once documentation solidifies we're able to translate documentation into core languages like Japanese for example which is a very important market for us so look for that the coming weeks as well and we'll try to create a nice feedback loop so that if you find typos mistakes the documentation is confusing or incomplete you guys will be able to give us a heads up about that we should be able to correct that we are still working very diligently and hard towards getting dates for the launch of Shelly's main net it looks the Haskell test nets will be divided into two phases phase one as I've mentioned before will be strictly for stateful migrations so the point of that is to get everybody who's currently living in the instead of ice test and running a stake pool comfortable with the redeploying their infrastructure in that that environment and that'll take a little bit of time for people to get used to Danelle is leading that task force so once those metrics works are done and we've gotten the final business and technical requirements functional and non-functional requirements for basically what we need to do to get stake tools where they need to be all the Shelli side then he'll be working exclusively on that side of the angle is how do we translate what we have on rust into Haskell and make sure people redeploy and this will be a good metric for active because it'll give us a very good sense of what we'll have available at the launch and main Network and then of course they'll run it and that's a great data test for that Haskell software although internal testing is indicating that that software is quite high quality and very stable and we have a very sophisticated benchmark framework that we use to test what we're bringing to market so I do not anticipate that the experiences that you've had with the ITN and so some of the instabilities we've had with the ITN will translate over to the Haskell side I think we should have very mature software even at that early stage for that stateful migration test now then after we've migrated we have stability things are looking good the next step will be doing a series of updates to get basically people ready for the balance check so what the balance check will be is we'll be able to enter in your credentials you have from the Shelly from byron main net and the things you've done with the instead of ice test net and then we should be able to verify your balance meaning that all the money you have plus the rewards you earned those things should come together and you should see that balance accurately reflected in your wallet interface and of course there's gonna be something always is something and either on the our side or the users side and the point of this is to get out those kinks and then once those two things are done then we have everything necessary for the launch of Shalott on maintenance so given that we have much stronger relationships and communication patterns with the exchanges and our enterprise actors we are able to do a lot more parallel and that means the testing phase is considerably reduced and also given the way we've built the Haskell software does not require as aggressive QA because we're doing a lot of the QA upfront prior to even bringing it to the customer really a lot of these things are about experiences rather than verification that the software works correctly and just making sure that people understand what's going on so I don't anticipate these phases lasting very long and they will begin rather soon so towards the end of February we'll have a firm date set for the first test net and that's the state pool migration and then when we get to the state pool migration phase we'll have a firm date for how long that's going to last and when we'll begin the balance check phase and when we get to the balance check phase we'll have a firm date set for the launch of the main net again these things are moving rather quickly and our Sprint structure is every two weeks so we're learning and we're basically getting very accurate estimates as we move forward but we don't want to over promise and so it's really important for us to have accurate dates now my intention is to have the Shelly main net launch be in Kyoto and have a very large launch party and vide our Japanese community and people from around the world to come and for our product team to come and our core developers to come that's where we launched Cardno back in 2017 in Tokyo it would be really nice to launch Cardinal with cherry blossoms around the most beautiful city in the world and do it at a beautiful time so I'd like to do that in spring/summer and sooner the better because the cherry blossoms only last so long so the team is highly motivated we're definitely all working the same direction we're doing more things in parallel now than we've ever done in the history of the company for example we just had a very large workshop for zero knowledge proof in Edinburgh in January 20th we had another workshop in Belgium just two weeks later that discussed Goggan and we were getting some of the key KPIs and deliverables for the Govan release we're having other workshops around where we're bringing developers and product team people together and clarifying business and functional requirements in our product backlog and getting things into our new management structure so so overall it's just nice to see these things come together we also actually bidding out the ledger update right now and getting bids from 3 different companies to do the cold staking and multi-sig support for a ledger that I've asked for and make sure that that ecosystem gets carried with us we also have an identity product that we're building with 12 people who work full-time on it called prism and that identity product will formally announce and show you all the cool feature and things we've done alongside a demo of these capabilities in practice actually tested in Georgia for Cardinal come the launch party in Kyoto so Danelle is also the product manager for that and so he kind of serves the dual role of the staking experience as well as the identity side of the product there's a lot of other products that we need to start spooling up and spinning up we do need an Oracle solution and we are actually starting to spool some things up in those directions we're also going to do is stuff for payments and layer to stuff and we have a dedicated team that will be transitioned over for that as soon as they're finished with another product that we're closing out we also have a lot of intention to have a very nice asset issuance framework for card on also there is a group of people that are thinking about the actual time and there's a lot of writing that we have to do like explaining how our gas model works and splitting how extended you TXO is different from the world state system that aetherium uses and so forth so so overall the parallelism and the coordination that we're seeing is pretty amazing and I'm very happy about that in it's nice to see that every few weeks we keep getting goodies come out and the community is really doing a great job of keeping us accountable and the community is really doing a great job of making sure that we stay focused and on target we're also innovating and bringing new technology for example we have invented one of the fastest and most revolutionary snarks in industry it's called Sonics the paper came out last year and we had a skunkworks spend over a year meticulously building this and we should have that finished for the ZK standardization summit that the zero that the Z cash guys are putting on in London in April so vitally inand wardo are the two people who worked on this for over a year we'll be presenting there and we'll talk a lot about what we've learned about privacy and user updatable CRSs and these things and kind of the next generation of where that snark technology is going from private computation to recursive snark technology we've also been doing a lot of working quantum cryptography we recently not post quantum cryptography crypto to make your stuff secure from quantum computers but quantum cryptography so new cryptographic primitives that rely on quantum computers or simulation of them for example we just published a paper on one-time-use signatures signatures that you can only use one time and never again this would be tremendously useful for how we handle proof of stake in the signing of blocks that people commit so if you want are curious of that look at my Twitter feed this paper was published about February 3rd and I tweeted about it recently and you should be able to find that so we're doing a lot of groundbreaking work on the next generation of cryptography stuff and zero knowledge and stuff in quantum crypto and my hope is to try to pull as much of this as possible into card on aware and wind that makes commercial sense the Cardano Foundation has also started aggressively pushing hard on the CIP process and my hope is that they should be able to make some public statements soon about kind of the candidate first round of what principles they've pulled together for how they want to handle CIP we are also hiring a dedicated product manager we're in the final rounds of interviewing people and hopefully we should be able to make an announcement soon about the voltaire product manager whose job is to coordinate all the different threads we have the lancaster research role and he co-owned niqab steamteam Barrett Isis work the work we're doing with the Berkman client center the work we're doing with the European Union as well as what's materializing now at the Cardinal foundation and pull all these threads into a cohesive unit Goggan and Shelly are being built in parallel Basia will be built by an overlay team and they will be working in parallel soon and then what will happen is as we close the Gogan work the entire team that was doing Chilean Gogan work will focus on full tear so we're doing the preliminary work to get all that stuff ready to go for when that team pivots over so as we exit the summer voltaire will be their primary focus and basho is being built along the way and teachers are being added along the way Basho includes our sidechains technology our interoperability of technology and things that will celery at the protocol we've gotten our first performance results from simulations for or for Hydra and the simulations look good the exact numbers are still being discussed but it looks like our TPS rate is in the thousands and has a lot of room for improvement and scaling beyond that especially for the types of transactions that we're going to be running through the base ledger is looking it's performance is somewhere between 50 to 100 transactions per second so adding the scaling solution on top will give us the capacity over time to become a Visa scale or MasterCard scale system and we should be able to accommodate both simplistic micro transactions and very sophisticated smart contract transactions within the same framework and it fits very nicely into the state pool model that we've constructed for card on so overall it's nice to see that those research threads are bearing a lot of fruit the Hydra paper will drop probably publicly after the USENIX Obscure submission so suspect it will probably come towards the end of February but maybe a little sooner and likely will come out on a print debt so of course I'll tweet the paper once it's public so follow my Twitter feed and likely what we will do is write a blog post about what we're planning on doing with Hydra throughout this year but overall I'm very happy with how that research is evolving a very happy that that research is the first time where we have in parallel involved the science team our formal methods team for simulations and had a product manager from industry work together to actually make sure that that product was realistic as opposed to writing a paper or having the paper specified and implementing a prototype and then going back and revising the research and more waterfall mentality so I'm very happy about that a lot more to do as always software software it's my hardest thing you can do but we're we're finally we're finally feeling good about it so that's the update overall dates are looking sharp opf teased 20th towards the end of the month we'll give you the dates of the first Shelly test net for Haskell the end of life for the ITN we'll give you the dates for end of end of life reichian supports gives me will give you dates for when we're going to do the consumer upgrade for the byron reboot with the new wallet back-end you should notice the exchange is upgrading all throughout February in March and our partners are upgrading there will also probably do a blog post on translation of the Haskell code either JavaScript or web assembly for last year we've been working on the GFC Jas project to compile Haskell into JavaScript we've also been working with tweak on the Asterius project to compile Haskell into web assembly so this makes the Haskell code that were writing significantly more portable and we've been in discussions with a mergo about translating their back-end from rust primitives to haskell primitives when one that makes sense if this compilation can be done so given that we spent over a year of effort improving those compilation pipelines we should be able to write some blog posts and some statements about how mature that is but the advantage of this transporation is that we'll be in a good position to be able to build one source code base that is very very secure and nicely constructed that could potentially be used to translate applications into the web browser and translate applications onto the mobile clients so you don't have to lose the formal methods when you move into the JavaScript world or to the web assembly world and that's that's a really nice thing overall for everybody including our clients because then we can just focus on building on top of that rather than having to maintain multiple code bases at the same time I really would rather just stay in the Haskell world for the time being and make sure that everything is good there there's a little bit of cleaning you have to do on the formal specs on the gogans side we're still working on that and integrating each in the extended UTX model model properly and that'll be ongoing work throughout the spring and summer but we are seeing some stability in those specifications we are updating the or Boris Chronos paper and descoth Saros will also be coming out soon that's our paper are dealing with spikes of dishonest majority and we'll probably be doing some updates on our BFT papers and some updates on the or bores Genesis and prale's papers because we rewrote the classic paper and we'd like to make the Genesis and Proust papers in line with all the lessons that we've learned as well and the natural thing to do would be to roll everything up into a monograph or book basically explaining proof of stake and ten so these are releases throughout the year that the scientists will be doing as part of a behind kind of a cleanup phase so overall things are definitely looking good I wish I had more to report on the post quantum signature schemes Schwab a promised us some variant of XM SS custom-built for us with implementation by the end of January we're not quite there yet so maybe next update I'll be able to say something and there will be a product update from our product managers this month apart of you and all the product team will be leading that and we're still working with Tim on the exact dates but I would expect to see that towards the end of February and then thereafter every month the product team will be updating you guys it'll be a very significant update because each aspect of the product from the wallet back and Explorer to the node to the smart contracts I to overlay protocols and so forth all these things together each one has a product manager associated with it and basically every one of them are domain experts and where we're at what we're doing and how we're doing it so partner can talk a little bit about how everything orchestrates together and then each one can provide you guys much more depth than I provide on how these components are working and a lot of cases were actually dragging our product and project management out into the public domain many of you follow the weekly updates that Matias Ben Court does on the address deicide these are page turning updates that I have and my hope is to get more of our updates into github so you guys can see that but overall at least the videos provide something and of course Demetrius is still doing his weekly video updates on the instead of eyes test net and we'll continue to do that to the end of the life cycle of that soft and then our hope is that each of the product managers will also provide some regularity in addition to the roll-up once a month that we're planning on doing so thank you all for listening guys I really appreciate it it's been a lot of fun always giving you guys an update fun traveling I will be going to University of Wyoming on the 14th so if you happen to be in Laramie Wyoming I will be there and we are going to go ahead and publicly announce and big ceremony with the University our donation to the University for opening up our authentication lab and a Plutus development lab there so we're gonna create some jobs and Wyoming specifically for polluters developers to go and build some interesting things we're going to be doing a lot of work with beef chain well there and other partners and University of Wyoming will be the first University to accept a unique asset you'll have to wait until the 14th for to find out what asset we happen to be giving them for for this donation but the first University in the world to accept it and it's quite a large lab and we're actually getting matching funds from from other entities as well so I think the total commitment will be seven figures after it it all comes together and give us a great head start to be able to do some amazing things and we're very proud to welcome University Wyoming into our research family that now includes university of edinburgh university of athens and tokyo institute of technology having a fourth major university in that grid is is great and it's our first american university we've certainly done collaborations before was Virginia Commonwealth University and University of Connecticut in other places but these were generally collaborations around a particular professor or collection of people this is an actual lab our brand will be on it will you'll see the butterfly there and there's going to be a lot of Cardinal discussions and laramie moving forward and our hope is to eventually have a very substantial presence in Wyoming and write a lot of very good software there this is also our first foray into the hardware space so in addition to writing Plutus code they will be designing a special-purpose piece of hardware for the cardinal ecosystem specifically around authentication at this laboratory so we're really excited to go and enter that if you Alan Kay used to say that people are very passionate about software generally right they're build their own hardware and this is no different and we think that that's a great starting point for a whole litany of applications in the authentication and anti-counterfeiting space and can really add a lot of value to card on so we will record that presentation there will be a speech for me from the University and we'll do a lot of press releases and fanfare around that and it's a great beginning of a new relationship so we're real proud about it we've been talking about it for over a year and I'm real happy to actually see that this is a very applied laboratory or instead of just doing peer theory we're actually building real-life things and writing real software that'll enter production very quickly so so thank you guys so much for listening and until next time in Bocca al Lupo